Jazz Era Quotes

I have a fondness for jazz, particularly for jazz singers, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald all the way through the Sinatra era.

I prefer her [Nina Simone's] jazz period much more so than her folk period.

My dad was a huge big band and jazz fan, and we both sort of enjoyed be-bop, but man, it required so much skill to play it. And then there was cool jazz, the era that Miles, Coltrane, and Ornette ushered in, and that found a home in me. It turns out that that music was just really where I breathed.

The jazz boom was goin' on then so there was a lot happenin' in New York at that time.

I've always romanticized the late '40s and '50s - the cars, jazz, the open roads and lack of pollution. Now there are more vehicles, less hitchhikers, more billboards and power lines and stuff. People wrote wonderful long letters that took months to receive, and now everything is email.

Swing will never sound as good as it did in the '40s.

I appreciate men like Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins very much.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.

I came through the bebop era, and to me that was enough.

I came out with my five-piece group and opened at Billy Burke's Swing Oar. This was when Hollywood was really jumpin'. This was when Frankie Laine used to come in and ask if he could sing a number.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

I think The Doors are one of the classic groups, and I think we're all tempted to feel like the time in which we grew up was somehow special, but I really do believe that there were two golden eras in music: The Forties and Fifties of big band, jazz and swing, and the Sixties and Seventies of rock. To me, they're really unparalleled.

I've often felt I've been born out of my time, and when I started Fairground Attraction in the 1980s, I wanted to be a 1940s jazz singer.

I love that [ late-50s Verve recordings] - to me, that's the epitome of vocal jazz. It's my favorite style and era of it.

Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.

There was a period which I refer to as the 'Golden Age of Jazz,' which sort of encompasses the middle Thirties through the Sixties, we had a lot of great innovators, all creating things which will last the world for a long, long time.

If you look at the other singers of Billie Holiday's time, they were really trying to entertain. They were trying to make people feel good. They were singing fast - and she was singing the blues.

In the mid-1930s, a lot of the Big Bands sounded the same.

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis.

I fell in love with playing the trumpet because of what we call 'hot jazz' of the 1920s and 1930s, music that has a higher energy to it.

I especially like Duke Ellington jazz, which is a little more... I lived in New York for a while. I lived in Harlem for a bit, and I just fell in love with the idea of that era of New York, that jazz era, especially jazz in Harlem.

I still find it hard to believe that the whole era of jazz is over.